[15090] in Athena Bugs
Re: public discuss meeting
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Thu Apr 17 12:05:05 1997
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 12:04:47 -0400
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[15089] in Athena Bugs"
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
For the record, my reply to Mike/quickcomments (after which there was
a zephyr discussion that clarified that dropping bugs from the cc list
was not a Paranoid Attempt To Keep People Uninformed but simply
oversight :-)) is attached.
Basically I think the proposed split is highly suboptimal.
Lastly, it's worth noting that I complained about this originally in:
[2026] daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson) Athena Software Suggestions 03/12/97 18:52 (12 lines)
which got no response (sigh...).
--jhawk
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To: mbarker@MIT.EDU
Cc: quickcomments@MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: public discuss meeting
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
[ Please note that apparently bugs@mit.edu (A public list) was removed from
the cc list; I think this is poor, as it disenfranchises anyone not
on quickcomments (which is clearly biased) from expressing their
opinion. ]
| :) 3. Quickcomments should have a public discuss archive. PLEASE!
|
| It seems to me that there are at least two segments of dialogue to be
| served here.
Then there are two segments of dialogue to be served for
general discussion of Things Athena.
Please follow the existing paradigm.
| First is the need for comments about the quickstations to IS. Some of
| these contain private information or opinions, and the need to protect
| the privacy of the individuals should be respected. This group is
| being served by the current quickcomments mailing list. (I.e., mail
| is sent to a small group only)
I'm quite curious:
1) What sort of private discussion do you expect there to be?
Has there been anything of that nature in the past? This
seems, while plasible, rather unlikely, at least to my mind.
2) Why is there no such forum for non-Quick athena workstations?
Surely if Quickstations desserve it, so do regular ws's.
The best lists that exist right now, AFAIK, are stopit and
dcns-cluster, neither of which is quite what would be
wanted.
| Second is the need for open discussion about the quickstations. There
| is not currently a mailing list or discuss meeting to support that
| need, but I am sending mail now to get those started. I am going to
| use the name quicktalk.
This is analagous to suggest@mit.edu.
| I think this will help disambiguate the usage of the mailing lists.
|
| quickcomments is for private comments from users to IS.
|
| quicktalk is for public discussion of the quickstations.
I think this is silly. We shouldn't "fix" this for quickstations in a way
that's different from everything else. Therefore one of 2 things should
happen:
1) Quickcomments should gain a publically readable archive.
2) A non-public suggestion box for Athena stuff should be
created.
Frankly I think 2) is a bit silly, and perhaps it's arguable that non-public
quickstation comments would be of sufficiently low volume that they should
be sent to such a place anyhow :-)
Further, "quicktalk" isn't really very good, either. I'm in general not
interested in DISCUSSION about quickstations from people who have comments.
What I'm interested in is COMMENTS about quickstations from people who
have comments, where those comments are not confidential.
If you label the lists as you have above, a lot of non-confidential
comments about quickstations would go to quickcomments, preventing
people from seeing them.
Lastly, no where (that I know of) is it stated that quickcomments is for
"confidential" comments. Most athena lists are publically readable (if you
know where to find them), and that's the default mode. This change of the
default mode is disturbing to me.
--jhawk
